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“I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men.” Albert Einstein
Cassirer: Explanation Modifies the World
It was the 20th-century Jewish-German-American philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) who wrote1 that though science, myth, and religion gave us different and even mutually contradictory interpretations of reality, they were alike in using symbols as a basic means of making those explanations understandable: “The nature of the perception and the tendency of the ‘symbolism’ modify the phenomenon itself...the world evoked for us by myth and legend is not the same as the world that emerges from the explanations of scientists. Explanation itself modifies the world...” 2 Cassirer stresses that:
“the key difference ...between the function of the symbol in myth and in science is that science... knows the symbolic nature of its postulates...the force of gravity, for example, is a relation expressed by a certain equation and no more. The ‘force’ is a symbol ...Myth does not have this awareness of symbolism... only with the evolution of mythology into religion does this use of symbol become self-aware...The prophets fought against the cult of idols but idol-worshippers... knew no difference between the idol and the true likeness of the god. For them the statue was not a figure and its mask; it was the god himself.” 3
To explore the concept of God down the generations of Jewish thought I intend to ‘cling to the talons’ of three winging intellects: -- the “great eagle” Maimonides (known as Rambam from the initials of his name in Hebrew), who first established Judaism on a base of pure scientific-philosophical rationality, and explained all the depicted embodiments of God as symbols which alluded to the rational-scientific truth in the laws of the universe; Baruch Spinoza, the great Jewish philosopher, who under the influence of Rambam’s thought transferred key principles of the Maimonidean system into Latin, the language of science of his day; and Einstein, who identified his God with Spinoza’s. In these three we find a continuum of Jewish thought that (who knows?) perhaps springs from the hints and glints scattered throughout the Bible, and which are said to be sparks thrown off from the personality of the first Moses himself4.
El or Elohim?
Verse 11 of Exodus 15 puts in the mouth of Moses the words: “Who is like You among the gods, O Lord?” This is a line from Moses’ Song at the Sea, one of the oldest texts in the Bible, and expresses, on the face of it, a polytheistic point of view that recognizes the existence of other gods, among whom the God of Israel is pre-eminent. Only by following Cassirer will we understand how Maimonides masters this and similar problems of theory and interpretation.
In the poetry of Ugarit, which predates the Exodus from Egypt, and so also the Song at the Sea quoted above, El figures as a character from mythology (i.e. he is depicted as real, as alive and active). The El of Ugarit is the eldest of the gods, which at once awakes associations with early Jewish mystical literature and with the title ‘Ancient of Days’ which these mystics applied to God, and with its synonym ‘Lord of the Spirits’, the title of the Almighty in the Ethiopic Book of Enoch.5 The same terms were in frequent and accepted use with another famous Jew that Maimonides admired and respected -- Rabbi Akiba, and with his contemporaries of the Merkavah School. The Essenes of the same period also used them. The Ugaritic El is, thus, depicted in the figure of a man; he is the first, the senior, of the gods and so the designation ‘Ancient of Days’ is very fitting. In the mythological symbols of Semitic peoples, including the Canaanites, El is the husband of Asherah, who bore him Ba’al, Moth, Anath, and many more. He is also the creator of the world and of man. When he appears as El Gibbor (El the Mighty) and master of the power of fertility he is accorded the title ‘Bull’ -- hence the use of the calf and the ox as symbols of El’s strength.On the more abstract level of cross-cultural and cross-lingual comparison the term ‘El’ appears to be the common designation in all Semitic languages for the concept of divinity. ‘Eloha’ occurs in the Bible and in a number of Semitic languages. ‘Elohim’ is found only in Hebrew.
‘Elohim’ has Non-Monotheistic Applications, Too
For instance, the term is applied to gods in general: “...the divine beings [bnai ha’elohim] saw how beautiful the daughters of men were...and later too when the divine beings [bnai ha’elohim] cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring” (Gen. 6:2 ); also: “...when the gods [elohim] caused me to wander from my father’s house” (Gen. 20:13). ‘Elohim’ is also applied to strange and frightening extra-terrestrial beings: “And the King said to her ‘Don’t fear. What can you see?’ And the woman said to Saul, ‘I see a divine being [elohim] rising up out of the ground’...” (1 Sam. 28:13). In the ‘Mosaic constitution’ elohim designates the judges in a court of law, i.e. ordinary mortals of flesh and blood performing normal, day-to-day judicial functions, adjudicating in cases of property theft and such like:
“If the thief be not found, then the master of the house shall be brought before the judges [ha’elohim] to swear that he has not put his hand to his neighbor’s goods. For all manner of trespass, whether it be for ox, for ass, for sheep, for a garment, or for any manner of lost thing, for which one can say, This is it, the cause of both parties shall come before the judges [ha’elohim], and whom the judges [ha’elohim] condemn he shall pay double to his neighbor" (Ex. 22:7-8).
In a linked usage, elohim, applied as plural term to notables, probably also judges, occurs in a psalm expressing social concerns:
How long will you judge unjustly and respect the persons of the wicked, Sela.
Judge the cause of the poor and fatherless, vindicate the afflicted and needy;
Deliver the poor and the destitute, rescue them out of the hand of the wicked;...
I had taken you for divine beings [elohim], sons of the Most High, all of you;
but you shall die as men do, fall like any prince...
(Ps. 82:2-7).
The Monotheistic Content of Elohim
Notwithstanding the use here and there of the term elohim in non-monotheistic contexts, and these are a matter for specific textual criticism investigation, it is beyond question that, taking the Pentateuch and the Prophets as a whole, the significance of elohim is monotheistic and it is as such, pregnant and suffused with its monotheistic content, that it came under Maimonides’ philosophical scrutiny and entered his system of ideas.
In the Bible Elohim is distinguished by five qualities:
First: although the word has a plural form it is understood and treated as a singular noun (‘Elohim bara [not baru, the plural form of the verb ‘to create’] et hashamma’im v’et ha’aretz [heaven and earth];
Second: Elohim is one and alone, there is no other God, or additional God, or earlier God, or any similar concept.
Third: He is invisible and indescribable in physical or material terms (this in spite of a few exceptional word pictures that could be interpreted in such terms, e.g. Exodus 10, Isaiah 6, and Ezekiel 1, and which Maimonides of course interprets symbolically, as devoid of sensual or corporeal content);
Fourth: whereas the explicit four-letter name of God (usually written in English ‘Yahweh’ and sometimes pronounced [mistakenly] ‘Jehovah’) (Heb. יהוה) is a personal name of God, Elohim is a general or generic name. For example, in a relatively late biblical text, 1 Kings 11:33, there occurs the phrase ‘Elohei Mo’av’ = the gods of Moab. One would never find a corresponding ‘yehovei yisrael’, as it were ‘the gods of Israel’.5
We must take note, however, of a contemporary non-biblical text of the 8th century BCE from the archeological dig at Kuntillet ’Ajrud, south of Kadesh Barnea. This text contains the phrases, ‘To Yahweh of Shomron and to his Asherah’ and ‘To Yahweh of Taiman and his Asherah’. Such wording points to a polytheistic survival, whereby an Asherah i.e. a goddess-wife, is attributed to Yahweh, just as the senior Canaanite god, El, had Asherah for a spouse. Note also that, like the Canaanite god Ba’al, Yahweh is conjoined with a particular geographical place , Shomron, Taiman, just as there was a Ba’al of Pe’ur, a Ba’al of Tzaphon, and a Ba’al of Zebub, etc.). This is a striking instance of the gap between the folk-beliefs of the populace in the First Temple period and the pure monotheism that takes clearer and clearer shape over the course of the biblical narrative and reaches full flower in the later books.
The Unity of Human Laws and Natural Laws
Fifth: according to the concept of God that dominates the Bible, one, single supreme force created the world and is now the sole master and director of its fate. This supreme force is the source of the teachings received by the Israelites (the Ten Commandments and the Torah as a whole) and of the covenant between them and their God, as well as of the whole of human history and the fate of each individual. In Greek and in the philosophy of Plato, Socrates, and the Sophists this role is filled by the term ‘nomos’, which is the totality of laws that applying to mankind, -- laws which man has the freedom to create or, at least, to choose whether to obey (in the same sense that our Sages said “All is foreseen but freedom of choice is given”). This supreme force is also the same that controls all natural phenomena --in Greek, the phusis, which includes the earth and the celestial hosts, the whole universe or cosmos, rain, sun, summer, winter, flora and fauna, etc.
This unity of nomos and phusis (man’s laws and natural laws) is part of the Bible’s world view but not of the classical Greeks’. They separated nature and culture. When Socrates wanted to rescue morality from the criticism of the Sophists, Thrasymachos and Caliceles???, he was compelled to disconnect culture from nature. The Prophet Isaiah, however, in his utopian vision of the End of Days, had no difficulty believing that the same supreme force at whose wish the world was created and the Ten Commandments proclaimed, can impose the fundamental law of the nomos -- ‘you shall not murder’ -- on the phusis too: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid...and the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw”. After all, He who has created the laws of nature can also change them.
The Scientific World of Maimonides
To Maimonides, completely familiar with the achievements of Greek philosophy and science, all this was well known. One of the most important of Christian theologists, who knew Maimonides’ writings in Latin translation, St. Thomas Aquinas, quotes extensively from Rambam’s interpretations of Aristotle, declares Maimonides to be the greatest expert on the subject, but disagrees with his biblical interpretations, especially of the Book of Job, with respect to an issue that lies at the root of the philosophical-humanistic quarrel between Judaism and Christianity. The view that Aristotle and Greek science took of the issue known to modern-day science as the Law of the Conservation of Matter (i.e. nothing comes from nothing and matter cannot become nothing) stands in direct conflict with the biblical conception of Creation from Nothingness, a conception inferred by Maimonides from the fact that the first words of the Book of Genesis (in Hebrew) are “In the beginning created” and that only after them comes the word “God”. Maimonides was well aware of this conflict. How does he cope with this opposition between the philosopher, the philosophy, and the science that he loved and believed in and his understanding of the philosophy, physics and cosmology of Genesis and of other biblical passages that refer to the creation of the world and issues of physics, biology and cosmology? To that we now turn.
Professor Aharon Katzir has written a book that shows us how modern science appreciates and responds to Maimonides’ scientific thought,6 a book that is valuable for two central virtues. Firstly, it lays out the world-view of a researcher in the natural sciences, his philosophy of science as it were; secondly, we are treated to Katzir’s warm and genial personality, to his moral-humanistic approach that both science and humanity, and to the breadth of his intellectual compass. This is a scientist who, while adhering to the current goals and values of his discipline, has the capacity to apply philosophy ancient and modern, universal and Jewish, to profound difficulties in ethics and biology.
Katzir came to the study of philosophy in general and Jewish philosophical thought in particular through delving into “the two greatest problems facing science -- the problems of space and of time” (p. 99) and from there begins a fascinating intellectual journey that takes the reader through the problems of the biological clock, physical time, the psychological roots of the concept of time, mythological time, and “evolutionary time”. Two problems that physics is unable to solve “from within its own resources” -- defining the smallest unit of size in the universe and the essential nature of time -- Katzir refers to the philosophers. Exploring the teachings of thinkers ancient and contemporary, he surprisingly finds in two Jewish philosophers, Philo of Alexandria (25 BCE - 50 CE) and Maimonides (1135-1204 CE) bang-up-to-date answers that fit in perfectly with Einstein’s theories on relativity and the quantum.
What has Philo of Alexandria to do with Einstein?
“What is time?”, writes Katzir, “Philo’s hypothesis (and in this he is in full agreement with Einstein) is that time is an integral part of the material structure of the world.” (p.123). Katzir’s reference to Einstein is of course deliberately anachronistic but has the purpose of bringing Philo’s thinking ‘up to date’, that is to translate it into the language of late 20th century physics. The term ‘hypothesis’, for instance, has precise operational meaning in the modern natural sciences but was not part of Philo’s style or way of thinking. Such an epoch-linking technique also point us in the direction of Katzir’s conclusion, which is that in visualizing the structure of the cosmos, the ideas and concepts of Einstein bear a substantial relationship to the thought of his two great predecessors, Maimonides 800 years before him and Philo 2,000 years before. This relation is clarified all the more sharply when Katzir demonstrates the conformity between 1st century Philo and 20th century Einstein, on the one hand, and the opposition between the both of them and that other great physicist and thinker, the reputed outstanding genius of modern physics -- 17th century Isaac Newton.
Katzir says of Philo:
“Philo, a believing Jew, ... made a far-seeing claim that anticipated Einstein by 2,000 years. He writes in his book: ‘It is nothing but naivety to believe that the world was created in six days or in time at all. It is more correct to say that the world was not created in time but that the existence of time is contingent on the existence of the world, since it is the movement of heavenly factors that determines the nature of time.’
In other words, Philo affirms that time has no existence outside the material world. In this he is in dispute with Newton who believed that the world existed within time. 1,600 years before Newton, Philo argued that there is no such thing as an absolute time within which the world took its beginning, and that time is a quality of the material world itself. As long as there was no material world, there was no time. We could devise an aphorism and say that ‘Before the world was there was no “before”...since “before” and “after” came into being with the world itself...” (p.115).
Present-day physics’ thinking about the issue of time features a surprising symmetry between the structure of matter (atomic) and the structure of time. To his surprise, Katzir finds the same conception in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed.
Genesis is Rooted Essentially in an Evolutionary Point of View “Imagine my amazement,” writes Katzir, “when in chapter 73 of the Guide for the Perplexed I discovered that Rambam already knew about the atomicity of time...he states that the atomicity of time is a necessary derivative of the atomicity of matter...[We have here] a continuity of key ideas from Philo to Rambam to Einstein...” (pp. 125-127).
Doubtless, Katzir knows that Maimonides founded his scientific- philosophical system on his understanding of the Bible, namely, that the truth of science and philosophy is concealed within the hidden meanings of the Book of Books. Rambam states this clearly in his preface to the Mishnah and elsewhere, before him Philo had done the same in his allegorical (in effect, Neoplatonic) interpretation of Torah. Even if Katzir has not appreciated this, he has followed in their footsteps unknowingly. Spinoza took the same path: the concept of cosmic and biological evolution that he argues in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously in 1670, has one prime source -- the first source, the Bible. Katzir says on this point: “Genesis Chapter 1 is rooted essentially in an evolutionary point of view” (p. 115).
Although Katzir knows that the biblical narratives are, in substance and in style, closer to the early mythology than to modern scientific reasoning and language, he is penetrating enough to detect sparks of modern scientific intuition even in these 'primitive' myths. At the same time, with razor-sharp logic he chisels their forms of expression into modern-day 'scientese’ and in this way can display for us in one common language both the mythological (e.g. the biblical) and the modern perception of time.
“...for us time is a quantity, a one-dimensional coordinate, but for mythological man it is qualitative and specific; there is workaday time and holy time; Joseph the All-wise speaks of seven fat years and seven lean years,...and even we ourselves think in such mythic time terms ...when we use such expressions as ‘to gain time’ or ‘to lose time’ or when we promise a child that ‘he will learn with time’. Do we really think that we have ceased treating time as something tangible and manipulable, utterly mythic?” (p.109).
Between the Science of Astronomy and the Nonsense of Astrology Just as Rambam used an epistle to the sages of Southern France to praise the scientific precision of astronomy and condemn the twaddle of astrology; just as Spinoza dismissed all superstitions, including astrology, in the first chapters of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, so Katzir cites our occupation with astrology as an example of mistaken mythological thinking: “The extent to which mythological belief is still active in our own day we can see in the changing forms of dress astrology has put on down the ages. We know that the Chaldeans of Babylon were the first to discover that the course of the stars could be used to measure time and if time determines our fate the Chaldeans were convinced that man’s fate was an outcome of the movements of the stars. That was the beginning of the pseudo-science beloved of the gullible -- astrology”. (p.111).
Thus, Katzir has found for us, over a span of 2,000 years, an astonishing closeness of ideas in the cosmologies of Philo, Maimonides, and Einstein, particularly in the relations they perceived between space and time. Is it a coincidence that all three are Jews? Katzir neither looked for nor found such an explanation. He contents himself with highlighting the fact by expressions of astonishment, such as: “Imagine my amazement when” (p.125), “[we have here] a continuity of key ideas from Philo to Rambam to Einstein...”, “Maimonides adds comments that sound in our ears like the basics of modern atomic science.” (p.126) “1,600 years before Newton, Philo argued that there is no such thing as an absolute time” (p. 115)
Is there an Explanation for this Continuity of Ideas from Philo
to Maimonides to Einstein?
Katzir accepted this 2,000 year continuity between the theoretical physics of three thinkers, each Jewish by birth, culture, and national awareness, as an empirical fact and not as a phenomenon demanding explanation. So, he did not follow up the question why, of all groups, it should be Jews that led the evolution and refinement of the concept of time in physics, and this against the trend of opinions held by the most notable scientists. Why a line of thought matching the basic postulates of the key innovations in 20th century cosmology should spring up and develop within a particular ethnic group -- this is a question for sociology. Even more so the further question: Why should it have been the earliest of the three thinkers, living 2,000 years ago, who gave us the solution in principle to the key problem theoretical physics in our own time -- the relation between a world created ‘from nothing’ or by a ‘big bang’ and the emergence, creation, or existence of time, or, from another angle, time as the fourth dimension of physical reality. Having appealed to sociology, what then can it offer as?
In the 1960's Hebrew University's Dept of Sociology was graced by the late Professor Yosef Ben-David, who specialized in the fascinating issue of the sociology of knowledge, that is the sociological perspective on how inventions, discoveries and theoretical innovations come about. As Ben-David put it: Why was it Louis Pasteur of all people -- not a doctor -- who discovered the link between germs and illness, while hundreds of thousands of doctors treating millions of sick people failed to notice the connection?
Analysis of the social circumstances in which discoveries and innovations are made requires first of all careful exploration in micro. What was there in Philo's and Maimonides' spiritual world to explain their attraction to the physics of relativity and the quantum and how did Einstein enter the picture without receiving even the trace of religious or traditional Jewish education? Careful examination of the biographies of Philo and Maimonides reveals the following findings:
1. Both Philo and Maimonides were citizens of two intellectual worlds -- classical Greek physics and metaphysics and -- Judaism;
2. Both were disturbed by the conflict between the biblical story of the Creation (substance from nothingness) and the Law of the Conservation of Matter in its Aristotelian formulation (‘Matter cannot be created from nothingness and does not disappear into nothingness’);
3. Neither would accept the possibility of abandoning either of their two intellectual-spiritual allegiances;
4. As a direct consequence, each had to devise for himself an over-arching theory to encompass and solve the contradiction between the two worlds in whose truth he believed;
5. The most reasonable way for Philo and Maimonides to accept Greek physics, and Aristotelian physics in particular, as a coherent system without denying the cosmology of the first verse of Genesis as they read it, was to forgo the
all-inclusiveness of the Greek conception of the physical world. That is, they took out one component part of it. Philo found himself compelled to abandon the idea of the eternity of time and of time’s unconnectedness to the existence or non-existence of matter. It was this step, if I may borrow Katzir's time-hopping style, that led him into dispute with Newton 1,600 years before Newton lived and to find support in the space-time theories of Einstein 2,000 years in advance of their invention. Faced with a similar impasse, Maimonides felt obliged to forgo the Greek-Aristotelian law of the Conservation of Matter and to move into direct opposition to Aristotle's cosmology by affirming that the world was created from nothingness. That is, in the language of modern physics, it was created by a ‘singularity’ (the Big Bang, in simpler words) inexplicable by the known laws of physics. To quote the Maimonides scholar, Prof. Sarah Klein-Barslavy:
“Genesis 1:1, as Maimonides read it, is the narrative of the act of creation of the whole world: the whole world was created from nothingness...From verse 2 onwards... the creation narrative...presents the theories of the physicists...”7
Philo and Maimonides Avoid Confrontation between the Scientific
World-view and Religious Philosophy
Switching to the perspective of social psychology, perhaps we may be allowed to say that Philo and Maimonides, by each devising for himself an inclusive theory to encompass and solve the contradiction between the two worlds in whose truth he believed, avoided the 'cognitive dissonance' of a collision between value systems. Having found the bridge they needed, each could from then on proclaim both a world created from nothingness and the obedience of this 'singularity'-created world to the laws of physics, including the Law of the Conservation of Matter (Philo would have said that the world had been created at a ‘singular’ point of non-time). To put it another way, they wrote a Judaic preamble to Greek philosophy.
Perhaps this analysis fits Philo, who wrote in Greek in the Greek cultural surroundings of 1st century Alexandria, a little better than it fits Maimonides. Maimonides felt it necessary to declare the reservation that, although he disagreed with Aristotle on an essential point (the priority of matter), he nonetheless thought that, from the point of view of physics, Aristotle was right: in other words he did not slam the door on the possibility of interpreting Genesis 1:1 as the creation of matter from matter rather than matter from nothingness. Despite this, I would say that both these Jewish thinkers felt more comfortable within a philosophical-scientific system broad enough to take in both the laws of physics, including the Conservation of Matter, and a ‘big bang’-created world, a cosmos created out of nothingness.
Einstein: the Search for a Spinozaic Order in Nature
Quite unlike Philo and Maimonides, both of whom were raised in traditionally religious Jewish households, Albert Einstein was raised and educated in a secular, even anti-religious, family. Louis Feuer, author of a comprehensive and fascinating biography, sums it up as follows:
As a boy, Einstein was drawn to the religious life and was incensed by his father's sarcastic and hostile comments on dogmatic ritual, for it was a point of pride with his father that his house did not observe the commandments of Judaism. Albert regretted that they ignored the rules of kashrut and put his religious yearning into poetry full of a Spinozaic fanaticism that identified God with nature. His search for a Spinozaic order in nature seems to have been part of Einstein's early generational rebellion against the pure materialism of his father..."8
Einstein, the outstanding scientist of the 20th century followed in the footsteps of Spinoza, the great philosopher of the 17th century, and adopted his formula that God = nature (Deus = Natura or Deus natura est).8 Thus, it was Spinoza that formed the conceptual-philosophical-scientific link leading from Philo and Maimonides, through Spinoza to Einstein and his Theory of Relativity.
Einstein's Belief that the Essence of Judaism is the Aspiration to Truth and Justice
Yeremiyahu Yovel estimates that “the Jewish philosophical tradition -- from Maimonides...to Yehuda Abravanel -- furnished Spinoza with ideas and hints that, in context formed a legitimate part of that tradition but, in themselves and taken out of context, were capable of awakening audacious ideas...”10 Meir Hillel Ben-Shammai cites Einstein’s pride in his Jewish birth and his identification with the humanist spirit and the aspiration to justice that for Einstein were, at once, the true essence of Judaism and of its uniqueness, and also its chief contribution to humanity. He quotes Einstein’s own words in support of this:
A desire for intellectual exploration for its own sake, love of justice to the point of fervor, and an aspiration to personal independence -- these are the pillars of Jewish tradition that brought me to feel that my belonging to this people is a gift of fate...For as long as we remain true servants to truth, justice and liberty, not only will we sustain ourselves as the most ancient of living peoples but we shall continue as hitherto to work fruitfully to create values contributing to the betterment of humanity.” 11
The connections between the three names -- Philo, Maimonides and Einstein -- are for Katzir an empirical finding, witnessing as he says, “to a 2,000-year continuity of thought culminating in the conceptualization of space-time relations in both 20th century physics and Jewish metaphysics.” We have seen a social-cultural explanation for this phenomenon: how Philo in his time and Maimonides in his needed concepts from 20th century physics to prevent a ‘tragic contradiction’ between their faith in Greek physics and their allegiance to Judaic metaphysics. Spinoza -- to whose concepts the young Einstein turned out of a sense of a missing Jewishness in his father’s house and the repression of religious feeling -- made the link in the chain between early Jewish philosophy and Einstein’s innovatory physics. Philo’s and Maimonides’ ideas flowed through the Euclidean geometric formulations of Spinoza into the thinking of the young Einstein to help form there a world-view, which succeeded in reshaping 20th century physics and in solving difficulties in the Aristotelian and Newtonian cosmologies that till then had seemed insuperable.
Perhaps this is what Einstein was referring to when he spoke (above) of the contribution of Judaic culture to freedom of inquiry and the search for justice. Perhaps, also, this is what Katzir sensed when he laid stress on the “empirical finding” of the 2,000 year-long “Jewish connection” between Philo, Maimonides and Einstein.
The God of Maimonides and the God of Einstein
Long before Spinoza, it was Maimonides who transferred the concept of God from theology to physics and from anthropomorphic imagery to the realities of nature and the necessary existence of the cosmos. I quote from the Guide of the Perplexed, Part 1, Chapter 68: “For in the reality of the Creator -- everything is to be found...and if man should begin to believe that the Creator is absent -- then all existence is absent”. In similar vein, in Part 2, Chapter 14, Maimonides interprets the scriptural passage “they have forsaken me, the Fount of living waters” (Jer. 2:13): “This [the Fount] means: the abundance of life, that is, existence itself”. Maimonides also rejects those prejudices and folk-beliefs that claim that God watches over every living being:
“I by no means believe that every leaf falls by His Providence, or that the spider devours the fly by the law and wish of the Creator, or that the spittle that Reuben spat, which flew until it landed on a mosquito in a pre-set place and killed it -- I will not say that this is a divine decree, nor that every fish that swallows a worm from the surface of the water does this by the personal desire of God...”
(Guide for the Perplexed, Part 3, Chapter 17)
Einstein says the selfsame thing in 20th century language:
“I cannot imagine a God who distributes penalties and prizes to his believers, or any God who has volition in the same way that man has a will.”
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men."
The God of Maimonides, of Spinoza, of Einstein -- is the God of our present-day physicists, astronomers and biologists, religious and irreligious, believers or agnostics.
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